Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

The CIA had promptly paid to the LCBF Corporation the $120 million it had been offering to anyone who could deliver a Top Secret Russian Tupolev Tu-934A aircraft to them when Colonel Jake Torine and Lieutenant Colonel Charley Castillo had brought one back with them from the Venezuelan incursion known as Operation March Hare.

The Executive Compensation Committee of the LCBF Corporation—David Yung and Edgar Delchamps—had determined that Lester was one of those entitled to one of the one-million-dollar (after taxes) bonuses to be paid to active participants in Operation March Hare.

Aloysius did not want Lester to consider that he was in a financial position to walk into the Las Vegas showroom of Bentley Motor Cars and write them a $245,000 check for their best red convertible if he wanted to.

A red convertible did figure in the final step of Aloysius’s covering of Lester’s back, however—a Ford Mustang. One was sitting, gleaming, top down, in the lobby of the Mount Vesuvius, when Lester came in to claim his prize.

So was the general manager of the Mount Vesuvius, who was beside himself with remorse for having to tell Lester that his prize had been recalled by the Harley-Davidson people for unspecified mechanical problems and that it would be a month, six weeks, perhaps even longer, before a replacement could be made available.

“Perhaps, sir,” the manager asked, “you might be interested in the Mustang as your prize in lieu of the Harley-Davidson with mechanical problems you can’t get for a month, six weeks, perhaps even longer anyway?”

Ten minutes later, Lester drove the red Mustang down the Strip and then up the mountain to the House on the Hill, where he showed it to Aloysius and Peg-Leg, who both agreed with him that the red Mustang was one hell of a set of wheels.

The general manager of the Mount Vesuvius had been so obliging because he had standing orders from the man who owned the Mount Vesuvius, three other of the more glitzy Las Vegas hotels, and three more in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Biloxi, Mississippi, to do for Aloysius Casey whatever he wanted done.

This gentleman, whose code name was “Hotelier,” was one of five members of a group of men known to very senior officers of the intelligence community as “Those People in Las Vegas.”

The others were a well-known, perhaps even famous, investment banker, whose code name understandably was “Banker.” Another, who had made an enormous fortune in the data processing business, was a Naval Academy graduate whose code name was “Annapolis.” A fourth, who had once confessed to a reporter from Forbes magazine that he didn’t really know how many radio and television stations he owned, had the code name “Radio & TV Stations.” The fifth important member of Those People in Las Vegas was Dr. Aloysius Casey, whose code name was “Irish.”

What Those People did was secretly fund covert intelligence operations of the various “Alphabet Agencies” when the agencies could not either get the funds to do so from Congress or even dare to ask for such funds. Those People didn’t want credit for what they were doing, and for that reason—and also because what they were doing was, while inarguably patriotic, almost certainly illegal—used code names.

Dr. Casey’s role in Those People was unique. He had been asked to join, and been happy to do so, shortly after he moved about half of the AFC’s manufacturing capability and its most important research and development laboratory to Las Vegas.

Hotelier had learned that the redheaded middle-aged woman with the Boston accent who religiously—and for precisely one hour—dropped quarters into the slots in one of his places of business every morning after Mass was married to the chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation and drove a Chevrolet Suburban with Special Forces stickers on both its rear window and windshield.

He reasoned that Dr. Casey, as a Special Forces veteran, might be willing to make substantial financial contributions to the patriotic activities of Those People. And Dr. Casey, when approached, had been happy to do so.

Hotelier didn’t ask any questions about—and Dr. Casey did not volunteer any information about—Dr. Casey’s current and ongoing involvement with the intelligence or Special Operations communities.

It never entered Hotelier’s mind, either—or the minds of the other Those People—that Casey regarded them as no more than well-meaning amateurs whose money sometimes came in handy.

This came to a head when Casey learned that some of Those People had concluded that President Clendennen’s somewhat cold-blooded solution to a serious problem made sense.

The problem was that not all of an incredibly lethal biological warfare substance known as Congo-X had been destroyed when President Clendennen’s predecessor, shortly before his untimely death, had ordered the obliteration of a twenty-square-mile area in the former Belgian Congo on which was situated the laboratory that invented Congo-X and the manufactory, operated by former East Germans.

The President had ordered the use of every explosive weapon, except nuclear, in the American arsenal to be used for this purpose. It hadn’t worked. There wasn’t a tree left standing in the target area, but the Russians soon provided proof they still had some Congo-X. They proposed, in the spirit of international love and brotherhood, that they would turn over all they had and swear on all they held dear never again to make any.

In exchange, all they asked for was the return to the motherland of two SVR officers, Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva, who had defected from their posts as the SVR rezidents in Berlin and Copenhagen, respectively, and promptly told the American intelligence officer who had arranged their defection all about Congo-X. The Russians wanted him, too. His name was Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo.

President Clendennen thought this seemed like a reasonably fair deal and ordered that the swap be made. Some of Those People thought the President had made the right decision.

Before the people sent to find Castillo and the two Russians and to load them onto an Aeroflot aircraft could do so, Castillo learned that the Congo-X that the Russians had sent to the Army’s Medical Research Laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had been flown to the Western Hemisphere aboard a Tupolev Tu-934A, which was then sitting on the tarmac of an airfield on Venezuela’s La Orchila Island with the last liter of Congo-X aboard.

About a week later, the Tupolev landed at Andrews Air Force Base flown by Jake Torine and Charley Castillo. On board, in addition to the last liter of Congo-X, were some people, including General Vladimir Sirinov of the SVR, whom President Putin had personally put in charge of the operation, and Mr. Roscoe J. Danton, of the Washington Times-Post Writers Syndicate.

While they were waiting for the CIA to write the check for the $120 million bounty they had offered for a Tupolev Tu-934A, the Merry Outlaws, as President Clendennen disparagingly had dubbed them, went to the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas to talk to Those People about their agreeing with President Clendennen’s decision to throw Charley, Sweaty, and her brother Dmitri on an Aeroflot airplane.

With an effort, Charley rejected Edgar Delchamps’s suggestion—which had Sweaty’s enthusiastic support—on how to deal with Those People. This was to “throw them all in the great white shark aquarium at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino and let Neptune sort them out.”

At the confrontation, Annapolis gave Charley his word of honor that he had been dead set against President Clendennen’s solution from the start and would not have permitted it to happen. As a former member of the Corps of Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy, Castillo knew that he could accept without question the word of honor of a former member of the Brigade of Midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Radio & TV Stations surprised everyone by backing up his statement that he had told Those People that they would load Charley on a Moscow-bound Aeroflot aircraft only over his dead body by revealing not only that he had been an Army helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War—it would be a toss-up between Radio & TV Stations and Lester Bradley as to which looked less like a warrior—but that Charley’s father, shortly before he was killed, had rescued him from certain death at great risk to his own life.

But the biggest surprise of the confrontation had been that between Hotelier and Edgar Delchamps.

“Actually,” Hotelier said, “I thought Clendennen was right.”

That, Castillo and Casey decided instantly, meant Hotelier wasn’t going to live long enough to go swimming with the great white sharks in the Mandalay Bay aquarium. Delchamps was going to throw him out the window right there in the for